Ockham

Ockham's Razor states that "the simplest solution is the best."

This may apply to science, but everywhere else it simply stinks.

Imagine, if you will King Lear. Shakespeare starts with "I thought the king had more affected . . ." and finishes with "Shall never see so much, nor live so long."

Ockham's King Lear reads as follows: "King Lear died."

While the latter is more sucsinct, it is also pointless. Likewise, to apply Ockham's razor to the study of such things as the Bible or the meaning of the Bible is absurd and dangerous. It results in such interpretations as I mentioned in my previous post.

Revelation and the Rest of Them

After seeing all the other posts on Revelation (a.k.a. The Apocalypse of St. John) I decided to insert my own two sense and a half bit.

A wide variety of interpretations for this book have been offered over the years. Most recently, the favorite is the "Left Behind" version. This is based on a very literal understanding of the book, complete with literal Locust and multi-headed beasts, etc. One of the fundamental tennets of this belief system is the idea of a Rapture, where the believers in Christ will be removed from the earth, either before, after, or during the Great Tribulation (dun dun dun)!

An interesting thing about this theory? A hundred-and-fifty years old. Yeah, no where near as ancient as the book itself.

One of the more literate, or intrespective interpretations of Revelation is that it is a commentary on first century Israel/Rome. The number 666, for example, can be acheived by adding up the numerical value of Nero (most ancient literate cultures applied numerical values to each and every letter, hence how we end up with the roman I,V,X,L,C,M). This theory states that Revelation is first about Rome in its apocalyptic senses, while about heaven in its spiritual sense.

Most people tend to ignore the fact that half of Revelation is spent discussing heaven and what it is like there. Within the Catholic tradition, almost all understanding of heaven is drawn from this book.

Personally, I'm a big fan of using this work as a guidepost of heaven, because it deals with the joy of the future rather than perpetual damnation, et al.

Worldview

Our Professor may or may not have mentioned this subject. His classes have a tendency to blur along the edges, so I'm not sure when he talked about his.

"There are more things in heaven and on earth than dreamed of in your philosophies" Hamlet tells Horatio in the play by Shakespeare. To Hamlet (and likely to Shakespeare, but that's another can of worms) the world, just like our class, is blurred around the edges. There is myth and legend and it is not all of it false.

Modern science (and, by relation, philosophy) would like to tell us the opposite: there is much less in the world than dreamed of. It suggest that we ought not to believe something until we can prove it true. One of the most commonly uttered phrases has become "What proof is there?" No longer can we accept the existence of something off the words of one man, or even a group of men. No, today we need properly educated scientest to tell us there is enough proof to believe in what man has known for centuries.

It is the former worldview that allows discoveries, is optomistic, and allows one to read litature as it ought to be read. Imagine trying to read The Lord of the Rings with the continuous assumption that the whole thing is false. It will destroy any chance of enjoying the book, not to mention making the reader a more jaded person.

The same thing applies to the Bible. When you read it as false, you find or invent errors, put all your effort into disproving the book or learning why it is flawed, instead of enjoying it as one of, if not the, best works of literature ever compiled.

Everything

So, I decided I would post about everything. Not just part of everything, but all of it. So pardon any ramblings, and any long length this post might acheive.

Of course, due to the nature of this class, this discussion of everything will naturally have to do with the Bible. All of it.

We, being more than I, have, due to the issue of time, only looked at a portion of the Bible. In English. Which, as we all know, is the language Jesus spoke. With all the thees and thous, one knows God was in charge. And spoke what he spoke. And nothing else. And so we gathered our knowledge, and pooled our resources, and this was the result. We searched for many days and soon detrimened our answer, or lack there of.

So I'm done. Length is lost.

What we Believe

So this post is rather long. I apologize in advance.


Everyone, in any issue they are passionate about, has a single position they would like to advance as true, for they believe it true. These ‘true’ positions, however, are often in conflict with each other and all but one must, therefore, be false and some of the facts being misconstrued. But because “we believe in what we want to believe,” the simple facts cannot so easily dissuade people, nor will a lack of facts. The desire to hold truth (and, more specifically, one’s own truth) is more powerful than external evidence.

This holds true for religious, political, conspirital, scientific, or any other type of belief. This makes it difficult for anyone to disprove something or to even install an effective seed of doubt, for one simply refuses to believe or acknowledge that which stands against what they consider to be true.

When dealing with truth, however, we can offer no quarter. One cannot except what is patently false as true simply because it supports a certain world view. To do so would be intellectually dishonest, the death knell of thought.

There are four levels to each persons beliefs. There is 1) what they want, 2) what they want to believe, 3) what they believe, and 4) the truth. Let us take a moment to examine each of these in greater depth.

What they want: Most people, to some capacity or another, want humanity to be peaceful and prosperous. Desires such as these, however, are almost impossible and all people agree. It is highly unlikely that anyone even remotely intelligent would actually believe that man is peaceful, but they probably desire it.

What people want to believe is that which is something conceivable but which there is not enough evidence to stir their belief. Under this category is that some people believe because of its evidence which someone else does not, because, while there is evidence, it is not enough to convince them.

What people believe is simply that which people believe. They may or may not have evidence for their position, but they desire it to be true and have found no reason potent enough to cause disbelief (or they disbelieved the evidence). It is in this category that convictions are held, whether they are religious, political, or even conspirital. Peoples’ world views are generally based on their beliefs and they shape everything people do.

The truth is the most difficult of the four to accurately and fully understand. While many people hold conflicting beliefs and desires, there is always only one truth. Therefore, in each conflict only one of the views can be correct, no matter how convinced the parties are. Jesus was either God or he wasn’t. 9-11 was either a conspiracy or it wasn’t. No currently held view may actually be right (such as the case of quantum physics) but at most only one can be true.

This moves us to the question of how we find the truth. Despite popular opinion, there is Truth. The world, however, often ignores this, and therefore Truth is not firmly grasped by people, and in some cases, is not held at all. For the purpose of simplification, Truth will be considered that which is an accurate representation of the world.

There are certain criteria that help to show truth (we can, in essence, prove nothing, therefore truth is revealed but nigh complete agreement). First and foremost, evidence is necessary for proof, both in the positive and the negative. Positive evidence is offered as proof that Theory is effective in describing the world. Negative evidence simply works to disprove other theories. For example, positive evidence for the dangers of Communism, would be Stalin’s regime, while negative proofs to the same end would show the lack of such horrors in free states (not that free states are without problems, just that the problems are far less than under Communism).

To be valid, evidence must, in someway, point back to an eyewitness of some sort. This could be a person who saw (in our previous example) the death camps, or somebody who knew a person who vanished after expressing anti-Communist ideas. It could be as far removed as a demographist who notes an odd shift in the population. Only one of these people were, in the most basic sense, an eyewitness, but all three noted things that pointed to a death camp. It is also well to notice that only the eyewitness conclusively knew the purpose of the deportation/deaths.

Secondly, the weight of the evidence must be understood. If ten eyewitnesses claim Communism is the best thing that happened to them, while ten thousand said it was the worst, one must lay put extra weight behind the mass testimony. This does not mean that the majority are always right, but when they are witnesses, they are less likely to be hoodwinked.

Third off, proposed or theoretical truth cannot contradict absolute truth. Therefore, one cannot say that birds fly because gravity does not affect them, for that proposed truth contradicts the known truth of the Law of Gravity.

The conclusion we reach here, however, is that no body approaches a study without at least some degree of prejudice, therefore forcing an examination of any issue to be moved from the issue itself to the theoretical realm of truth, where a wrong cannot, under any circumstance, exist along side a right. This applies equally to the study of the Bible as anything else. Many enter their study of the work trying to prove it wrong, or that the traditional view of its origins (such as years written and authors) is false. Needless to say, it is easy to see how the intent can mar the outcome.

Prelim

So a simple question: what if our presupposition for understanding the Bible is wrong? What if there is no point to reading it outside of the context it was passed onto us in? What if the Bible's truly valid reading comes only from understanding it as the holy book of the Western faiths? What if the modern deconstruction of the Bible is completely wrong?

What if?

I'll reflect more on this tomorrow, more specifically looking at the issue of what our understandings are.

P & C

As promised, more postity-goodness. It's a bit late for me to be writting, so we'll see how coherent this is, and whether or not I say what I intend to say. Or something.

When we read literature from a Biblical perspective we need to look at who wrote it and when it was written. Specifically, one needs to know if the author was Protestant or Catholic/Orthodox (I am referring to anything written over a hundred years ago at the moment). Each group has a very distinct way of reading the Bible, and as such they draw different things out of it.

For example, it is highly uncommon to find a Protestant using the Virgin Mary as a major theme, while the exact opposite is true for a Catholic (try and read any long work of Catholic literature without coming across Marian imagery). Thus it is unlikely that when reading, say, Jane Austen, one will find a lot of Marian imagery, while it abounds in the works of Flannery O'Connor.

In addition, this dichotomy of reading has deep theological implications, the biggest of which is the issue of Tradition (as I believe I have mentioned before). Since a Catholic writes with up to 2000 years of tradition the work takes on a distinctly older character (if the writer is good). Protestant authors, on the other hand, work in a perpetually young faith and thus their writing seems to hold more weight in the hear-and-now.

I'm not going to spell out all the difference (and you wouldn't want to read them if I did). Rather, I am going to let you dwell on the thought that those differences do exist, and they provide for two (three if you count the Hebraic) ways of transforming the words of the Bible into more modern literature.

Aphesis

So I have posted for a while. I still have a lot to say, and worry I will never say it. Alas.

The Greek word Aphesis (Αφεσισ) is translated as liberation or loosing. It is used throughout both the Old and New Testament, and is most often seen in relation to the concept of Jubilee.

In the Old Testament God demanded every seventh year to be a special year, a sabath year. Every fiftieth year, after seven sevens (forty-nine) was to be a year of Jubilee. On that year all slaves would be freed, debts forgiven, and land returned to those who originally owned it.

After some time Israel forget these practices and that is why, according to Jeremiah, they were sent into exile in Babylon.


In the New Testament, Jubilee is not explicitly mentioned, but the concept is revealed in the actions Jesus takes. He sets man free from their sins, forgives their sins, and returns health to those who lost it. In many of these cases, the word uses is Aphesis, which is the same word used in the Septuagint.

These theme of liberation makes it way through out both Testaments, and is one of the major underlying themes of the Bible. It continues on into the epistles, where St. Paul says "It is for freedom Christ set you free" and " Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." The dichotomy of slave and free is a major issue to most of the Biblical authors, as it is to Isaac Basheva Singer, whom we all know by now (one would assume). I may later interconnect those two, but as for now, I am finished.

Mark and Mystery

So I'm talking about Mark again. This time, however, I am speaking on the man John Mark, rather than the Gospel proper.

There has long been a traditional interpretation of the verses of Mark 16:50-52 (about the young man with the linen robe). Assuming that Mark was written by John Mark, and that John Mark was with Jesus, at least at one point, many believe the young man to be John Mark in a self insertion. He was with Jesus on the last night and fled (self-depricatingly) when He was taken.


There are also other understandings of the word mystery. The most common among Christian's is the idea of something that cannot be fully known by human minds. Thus in Christian Theology (and any works of literature coming from a theological position) mystery can never be really known, and thus is always a mystery.

And speaking of mystery and secrets, The Prestige offers some really interesting ideas about mystery. The movie is about two rival magicians and what exactly makes a secret. It is quite a good show.

"Are you watching closely?"